Sustainable logistics facilities: a simulation-based approach towards warehouse decarbonization within the food and beverage industry

Logistics research has recently shifted the attention to the environmental impact of logistics facilities as a response to their increasing contribution to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, as such, warehousing now plays a crucial role in the decarbonization journey. Focusing on the food and beverage industry, well-known for its high energy-intensity related to both industrial and warehousing processes, many companies are leveraging 4.0 technologies to support the transition to green warehousing measures to enhance the energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of their production and logistics processes. Nevertheless, literature still lacks guidance on implementing green warehousing measures and offers limited insights into real-world applications. This paper aims to address these gaps by proposing a simulation-based framework and its application on a real industrial business case. This framework supports companies in their journey to reduce carbon emissions at their logistics facilities and helps practitioners in their decision-making processes to identify the most suitable green warehousing measures based on the specific needs and features of their warehouses. The developed framework is applied in a real-world business case to enhance reliability and evaluate the benefits in terms of environmental and economic sustainability. The simulation results indicate that renewable energy sources have significant potential to reduce environmental impact while maintaining high economic performance, and the implementation of a battery energy storage system improves energy consumption performance at the expense of economic performance.